Pollsters in the Eye of the Storm

Now that their work is done, their final numbers are in and there’s nothing left to do but wait for validation or recriminations — at least for those not conducting exit polls — how do pollsters spend Election Day? I asked a few, none of whom are taking a day of rest.

Mark Blumenthal no longer conducts polls, instead analyzing them at Pollster.com. But from his former career as a Democratic pollster, he describes the feeling for a campaign pollster: “Election Day feels a lot like the eye of the storm,” he said. “Everything around you is calm while your client and their campaign are furiously campaigning and working at getting out the vote. As a pollster, you don’t have much to do but watch or (if you’re so inclined) go knock on doors with everyone else.”

The situation is a bit different for media pollsters. Jay Leve, founder of the polling firm SurveyUSA, and Kathleen Frankovic, director of surveys for CBS News, won’t be finished working until late tonight. Frankovic wrote, “I also manage the CBS News decision operation on Election Day — so it is not a day of rest for me!” She told Time her main goal on Election Night is to stay off the airwaves, as an appearance on camera would suggest CBS had blown a call.

Leve, meanwhile, is conducting 30 surveys Tuesday night, commissioned by a voter-fraud watchdog group. “Miller Time for us is not until 11 p.m. ET Tuesday, when those polls are scheduled to finish,” Leve said. “When all the election polls finish, the sensation is difficult to describe, but it is similar to what a marathon runner experiences at the tape: extraordinary exhaustion mixed with pride and accomplishment. For most marathon runners, that is not directly tied to whether they finished in 6th place or 66th place, but rather has to do with whether they feel they ran a good race. We feel that we have run a good race in 2008, and should it turn out that other pollsters end up with better times, our hat is off to them. We salute them.”

J. Ann Selzer, the Des Moines-based pollster who sweated out the Iowa caucuses and was proved right, is at the office, catching up on non-election polling projects. And tonight, “I’m watching coverage and maybe some exit polls and worrying.”

Regardless of their political preferences, pollsters have reason to worry about a McCain victory, which would run counter to their collective opinion research. “A McCain win would shake the earth for pollsters,” Selzer said. “In every way that we think we could be off, it favors Obama, not McCain. So, we’d likely spend countless hours hashing and rehashing and trying to figure out how Newtonian physics had forever changed.”

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